That apoplectic vallecula called Timelines
by Not Just a Nerd
Summary: An alternate timeline in which Rose, like Ashlidr, bears the Myre medical kit and hence the consequences of never dying. And another where Rose stays with the Doctor and has to face the raven. A story of love and heart break. Rose x Ten. Two-shot. Completed. Spoiler warning for season 9.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, or any dialogs or lyrics quoted here.**

What if you knew a world where the laws of physics didn't apply? Where there was something with a speed much greater than that of light, where time travel was possible and happening, where every choice you made lead to different futures? What if you could see these futures spread out in front of you? Millions of timelines, twined together like helixes of DNA, each unique strand visible right in front of your eyes?

If you could know the consequences before you performed the action, if you had that chance, if you had that choice, wouldn't everything be so easy?

" _If you could replay this, where would you stop to untie your hands?"_

There's a distinct possibility that he has got himself into trouble again, but she tries not to worry about that, instead focusing on the lovely view of seventeenth century London from the balcony. She sees the city, the buildings, the people, beyond the thick wall of trees surrounding this abandoned mansion that the TARDIS crash landed in, and a part of her wants to just go explore without the Doctor. She can take care of herself, did so in the parallel universe for years and found a way back home without any help. She will be alright, _molto bene_. Oh, so she's now picking up his lingo, brilliant- and another word of his, yay.

Gown scraping across the tiny path leading to the avenue, thankful that the long bell-shaped skirt is doing a fantastic job of hiding the bright pink converses that so do not fit into this century, she creeps through the woods, praying the herbs are not poisonous or itchy, when a shadow passes by for a fraction of a second. She would have chalked it up to mere imagination amplified by the spooky atmosphere around her, if not for the fact that she's seen worse and isn't easily scared, and is rarely wrong about these things.

"Who's there?" She calls, and when there's no reply, she takes a step forward towards the general direction of the shadow, and asks again.

When there is still no reply, she suddenly remembers the story of the entity still free in midnight, appearing as a mere shadow till it learns to mimic and adapt and take over, and a cold chill runs down her spine.

So she is almost relieved when a girl steps out from behind a bush and regards her with curiosity.

"Oh, hello there", she breathes out. "I'm Rose. Been exploring the place. I reckon you are too?"

"You speak in such a strange and eccentric manner." The girl, who can't be more than eighteen or nineteen, says. "It reminds me of somebody I once knew, but I am not certain of whom."

"Okay", Rose says, unsure of what to say, and once again she regrets not spending enough time on history lessons to know how to speak.

"I am me." The girl says.

Rose laughs. "I can see that. But what's your name?"

"No, that _is_ my name. I call myself Me." The girl says, and waits for Rose to ask the questions that she has been asked so many times before, and it takes her by surprise when she doesn't. "You don't seem startled by this at all like the others."

Rose smiles. "Trust me, it isn't the weirdest name I've heard. There's this bloke of mine. Calls himself the Doctor. _Just_ the Doctor."

Me's eyes widen in a strange mix of recognition and fear and hope and anger, and she loses a little of her composure. "You know the Doctor? Is he old, wrinkled, with grey hair, and carries some kind of black magical glasses?"

Rose mentally thinks over the previous incarnations of the Doctor, and realizes none really fit the memo. She laughs at the thought of the fit her Doctor who throw if he thought he would look old someday. "No, he _definitely_ looks young and not wrinkled. He sort of has brown hair. Really, _really_ great brown hair. And sorry, but plain old black rimmed glasses. Looks really hot in them though."

"How can a person look _hot_?" Me asks, now certain that the Doctors they are talking about are indeed different.

Rose kicks herself mentally again for her slip of tongue, and prays that the Doctor and Me never meet and she never tells him she actually called him hot out loud, because if that ego of his expanded even a tiny bit more, _she_ is going to explode. "Never mind", she says, and decides to change the subject. "So what _are_ you doing here?"

Me responds with a slight tilt of her shoulder. "I live here."

Rose laughs at the joke, and when she realizes it isn't a joke, she's filled with concern for the girl. "What? On your own? In this creepy place? Where are your parents?"

"Dead, I suppose." Me says, with the clear lack of emotions clouding her face.

"I'm sorry", Rose says, remembering her own family in the parallel world and feeling a familiar pang of longing for them.

Me merely nods, courtesies, and disappears behind the trees again before Rose has time to offer her to travel with them to some place more suitable for living for a young girl her age.

She doesn't have long to think about it though, because the Doctor comes running in her direction soon. "You will never believe who sent me a message on the psychic paper."

"River Song?" She guesses easily, spoiling his fun oh-so-intentionally.

He scowls in mock hurt, and nods in affirmation, before he continues. "She sent me two actually. First one says Clara's in trouble, come help."

"Who's Clara?"

"Don't know her yet." He shrugs, and continues. "Not to worry. The second says never mind, wrong Doctor. Oh, well, now that that's done, let's get out of this place, nothing to do here, I'm _so_ bored, come on!" He hops on his feet impatiently, and she shoots him a glare.

"I'm wearing a bloody gown. You go, prepare the TARDIS. I'll be there in a mo." Before he can protest, she shoots him another glare, and he slumps his shoulders in defeat and leaves, mumbling something under his breathe about bossy Tyler women that she chooses to ignore for the moment. First, getting to the TARDIS in this god awful sorry excuse of a-

"Did he say Clara?" Me is suddenly back in sight, obstructing her path.

"I think so?" Rose says, feeling suddenly intimidated by the dark pit of raw fury in Me's eyes. She sees a flicker of recognition and hesitation, and then it all happens too fast.

Me shoves a piece of white rectangular something inside her forehead, and it disappears beneath her skin, leaving her with excruciating pain, till the world behind her eyelids turn black.

" _Sometimes the sky is piano black- piano black over cleansing waters."_

When she opens her eyes next, she's in the Med Bay of the TARDIS with a concerned looking Doctor by her side, staring at her.

"Don't say it." She warns, trying to sit up and finding that she can and nothing hurts. That's a good sign, she notes.

"I told you not to wander off. Why do you have to be so jeopardy friendly?" He scolds, completely ignoring her threat. "Now tell me what happened there."

She does, and sees the oncoming storm cast a shadow on his face with every detail she narrates. Finally, she gathers enough courage to ask. "I feel fine. You fixed it, whatever it was, right?"

He shakes his head, letting out a hollow chuckle that hits her in some sharp corner of her chest. "I _can't_ fix it. I _made_ it."

"What?" She asks, confused.

"That's a Myre medical kit, reprogrammed for humans. I reprogrammed it and gave it to that girl sometime in the future."

"How do you know?" She interrupts.

"Because nobody else is brilliant enough to do it", he says sadly, and cups her cheeks in his hands. "I'm sorry, Rose. I'm so sorry."

She feels a little scared at his words, but more brave, because her doctor can never reprogram anything into a terrible weapon. "What does it do?" She asks gently.

He searches her face for reassurance, and gets it in the form of a soft flutter of her eyelashes. "It heals the body, from within. It means you'll never grow old and never die."

"Like Jack?" She asks, and he hisses involuntarily, and they both smile for a moment, before the gravity of the situation dawns on her, as does the sea of possibilities it opens up. "That's not a bad thing! I can be with you forever this way."

"You don't understand", he says, his hands shaking with the fear he feels inside. "Humans are not supposed to live forever. I don't know how you will react to that."

"Humans are not supposed to look into the heart of the TARDIS either, but when has that stopped me?" She counters. "Stuck with you, that's not so bad", she teases, covering his hands with her own, and giving him a soft smile.

"But Rose-" he tries to protest, but she silences him with a kiss.

"I made my choice a long time ago, and I'm not gonna leave you." She repeats, and he really wants to believe her, because even though he has lived long enough to know that everything eventually ends, and the longer it lasts, the worse the outcome, and the more the pain, and even though he is scared of the consequences, Rose Tyler is the one thing in the Universe that he believes in, and he chooses to hope that she will surprise him again.

" _Still I write my songs, about that dream of mine, worth everything I may ever be."_

The first few years are great. She jokes about the lack of wrinkles and bad eyesight and aching limbs and how she doesn't have to worry about him going after a younger model, and he jokes about how they have an age difference of nine hundred years and that's as young as it gets and he's an alien who abducted her.

A mayfly mutated to live forever is still a mayfly though. The first leaf falls off the tree one day when they escape a prison in an alien world, after just a little over a hundred years of togetherness.

"That was close", she pants, leaning against the TARDIS wall, and he plops down on the floor from exhaustion.

"Yep", he says, laughing. "Jackie would have killed me if she knew."

She lets her own laughter die down before she asks, "Who's Jackie?"

There's a place in his brain that stores thoughts of his personal hell- Gallifrey burning, people dying, people leaving, worlds ending- the worst things that _did_ happen to him and the worst things that _could_ happen to him. In that place is a special space devoted entirely to Rose Tyler, and she just ripped off the first page.

"You don't remember Jackie?"

She shrugs in response. "Someone I knew? A friend?"

"She's your mum", he says hopefully, and the lack of recognition in her face and the resultant look of panic punches him deep inside his very being.

He pulls her into a hug, and she holds on tighter, afraid that if she lets go, he will disappear.

Or worse- _she_ will.

" _She's lost in the darkness, fading away- I'm still around here, screaming her name."_

It happens at a slow yet steady pace. The human brain cannot store so many years' worth of memories. After she realizes she's forgotten her family, she starts maintaining a journal of the things that happen to her in hopes of remembering, but when she flips through the pages sometimes in the middle of a particularly boring decade, she can't remember the places and the faces at all.

It hurts for a while, but she gets used to it. She still has him by her side, and they still have adventures all the time.

"How did we meet?" She asks him curiously one day.

He's a little heartbroken that she doesn't remember, but he loves her enough to tell the story with a fond smile on his face. "I saved you from a bunch of alien mannequins, no big deal."

She rolls her eyes, because even if she doesn't know herself so well anymore, she knows him enough to know that isn't _exactly_ how it happened. "And then how did _you_ get into trouble?"

He tugs at an ear guiltily. "They kind of had me in their grip under the London eye. You kind of rescued me from them."

She laughs. "The high and mighty time lord, saved by a-", she pauses, and her next words strike a matchstick against his heart-shaped flame. "How old was I back then?"

Another dead leaf on the ground- he's lost count by now.

" _Blackened below, the river now flows, a stream on molten virgin snow."_

He has always been mesmerized by the beauty of creation. He has watched planets being formed, rocks and lands taking shape, soil peeling off layer by layer by layer. Now it kills him to watch it happen to her memory and her identity.

Rose Tyler, the stuff of legends, becomes a legend to herself, fading into obscurity with each passing century, until all that is left is a shadow of her that wears her skin and acts so different.

She doesn't cry for days when children die, she doesn't blink before she picks up a gun against a tyrant; she lets her hair grow its natural shade of ginger and forgets that she ever used to dye it blonde, and she tells him Rose is a really cheesy name. He wants to scream and run away, but instead he holds her close to his chest every night and listens to the steady rhythm of her heart-beat while she sleeps. These are the times when he can pretend that she's still her, and he's still him, and everything is A-Okay.

" _Walk the dark path, sleep with angels, call the past for help._

 _Touch me with your love, and reveal to me my true name."_

She knows she is losing herself with every passing day. There's not a strand of grey on her hair, and bright pink sweaters in her closet that she hates and doesn't remember buying mock her. She smashes her mirror in a melt-down when she finds a picture of herself with the Doctor that she can't even remember taking, and punches the wall when the horrible thing inside her fixes her bleeding hand just to feel the physical pain.

Because that's all she feels, that's all she knows. She loves him, she's sure. Something rooted to her core is entangled with the fibre of his existence, and she is so glad that she is in this with him. But the core is eroding away, and he feels like a stranger every time he tells her another story about a stranger named Rose Tyler.

A thousand years later, per the records of her journal, she starts to feel bored of their routine. She doesn't remember the places, but she knows she' been here and done this before- it all fades into a giant blur of familiarity. And familiarity does breed contempt.

The first time she is really scared, though, is the time when she finds herself kissing him with her eyes wide open. She knows she's supposed to feel love and joy and everything that feels so alien to her now, and it hurts that she doesn't, that she _cannot_.

She holds his hands a little tighter after that, afraid of slipping and falling into a pit of nothingness. There's a feeling of familiarity here too, like she had been about to fall into a void far away from his outstretched hands sometime in her past, and she hates how she cannot remember it.

There's a long monotonous stretch of time when she does what she does because she knows that's what she's been doing since she can last remember. A few more centuries pass till she grows tired of his constant blabbering and input of wrong co-ordinates and magnetic attraction to jeopardy and flirting with women and mirth at dangers. The pages of her journal tell her that these are some of the many things she adored about the man she loved.

 _Loved_. She notices suddenly. _Past tense_. And then the choice isn't even a choice- it's an inevitable decision.

"Take me back", she demands, and he looks so shocked that she has to explain. "Take me back to my home, my time. I want to see who I used to be."

He looks ancient and weary, and she notices that he's been aging through these years, albeit slowly, and it's like a slap to her flawless ageless face. She bites her tongue and holds back the tears of frustration, as he explains all the reasons why that isn't possible. "We can't cross our own time-lines, Rose."

She takes a threatening step towards him, chin held him with determination. " ' ."

At first he looks like he will put up a fight, but he surprises her by relenting. "Okay, but you can just watch from a distance. No interaction whatsoever."

She nods, and gives him a hug from sheer happiness, and when they pull back, she sees his eyes water a little in what she guesses is nostalgia.

It's the longest two minutes of her life till they land. London, Power Estate, 2005, New Year, right before they meet, he tells her, and she walks into the snow with the hope and faith of an amnesiac viewing an old tape to try to spark some distant memory.

She's a little disappointed when she doesn't recognize the place at all and feels nothing for it, and before she can talk to the two blonde women coming from a distance, the Doctor pulls her away hastily. It takes her a few minutes to realize that the younger blonde giving her mother a pep-talk about the possibility of finding love again is her.

 _Her_. Warm, compassionate, strong, with an unfamiliar accent, a tongue-touched smile, foreign hair and clothing, and everything about her that she does not recognize. She feels so miserable that the sobs refuse to come.

She feels the Doctor take her hand, and looks up to see love for her shining in his eyes. Even after all these years, all these changes, when she isn't even the girl he fell in love with, he loves her, and she? She doesn't even remember him, doesn't feel anything at all. She suddenly envies the girl she just saw, she had the one thing she would die for- the ability to die, how ironic.

"You can't talk to them", he reminds her.

"What happens if I do?" she challenges.

He never does answer her without mystery. "Something bad."

"To you or me?" She demands.

"To me." He says without hesitation.

"Because you will try to save me." She concludes. "Well, if you really do love me, and I know you do, then don't."

"Rose!" He protests, giving her hand a squeeze and tugging her closer to him. "Don't you _dare_!"

She isn't afraid anymore, of him, or of death. "Do you love me enough to let me _die_?"

"Rose, please", he begs.

But she is not that girl who is walking towards the building with her mum, the girl who would put others before herself. She is a human who has lived far too long and lost far too much to care- she's the woman who reaches out and touches her old self.

Old her looks confused and concerned, the Doctor looks terrified and broken and pained, but she just feels peaceful as the reapers come, and she gives him one last smile after oh so very long as she is finally freed from the prison of life.

" _As I am soaring I'm one with the wind…."_

Forewarned is forearmed, or so they say. He knows a world where the laws of physics don't apply. Where there are things with speeds much greater than that of light, where time travel is possible and happening, where every choice he makes lead to different futures. He can see these futures spread out in front of him- millions of timelines, twined together like helixes of DNA, each unique strand visible right in front of his eyes. There's a time line where Rose lives forever until she isn't Rose anymore and decides to end her miserable life.

And there's another where she's happy with the other him and her family in the parallel dimension, fish and chips, running, rows, dishes, mortgage, slammed doors, kisses- all in a happy picture frame, while he goes on with his lonesome life, and though it is dangerous to see his own timeline, he catches a glimpse of some version of him fighting clock-work droids, holding a bunch of roses in his hands, and not remembering the love of his life.

The choice is very difficult after that, like every right thing in the world is, but at the same thing, it is extremely easy, because he would put her happiness before his _any_ day. And so he steals a glance at this fleeting moment of happiness- Donna, Martha, Mickey, Jackie, Jack, Sarah Jane, the other him, and Rose, all the people that matter to him in his TARDIS, and programs the second last destination into the computer- the place where she stood on the worst day of his life when he burnt up a sun to say goodbye.

Bad Wolf Bay, parallel universe. "Does it really need saying?"

" _And it would break your heart, well, if you knew, that this is all about you."_

 **Lyrics from Barbarossa, Nightwish, Within Temptation.**

 **A/N: This plot bunny wanted to be written, so here it is. I managed to make myself cry, so yay. Reviews are very much welcome and appreciated. Thanks for reading, and I'm sorry, I'm so sorry!**


	2. Chapter 2

_("How long are you doing to stay with me?" "Forever.")_

He once told her it's unwise to place a bet with a time traveller. After all, he can glimpse at all the different timelines and see all possible outcomes of events, and he's never been shy about cheating like this.

She once told him something her mum told her when she was young, something she truly believes in- nothing is set in stone. We make our own destiny with the combination of choices we make throughout our lives. Nothing is pre-destined- our futures are a result of our decisions summed up.

He hates it when they are both right.

 _At a timeline that he sees..._

"Five."

He hurriedly fumbles with the Rubik cube in his hand. His thoughts are scattered all over the place- how beautiful Rose looks in a simple jeans and shirt, the speed of sound through uranium, the orange skies of Vertenium, and how he can see tiny specks of dust floating in the air, illuminated by a beam of light creeping in through a crack on the TARDIS door. If he thinks about it all in a grand scale, they are exactly the same- tiny dots of life floating through time and space, destined to be beautiful and tragic in the end.

"Four", she counts, her eyes fixed on the countdown app on her phone, her mind wrapped around the things she can do when she wins the bet. Hello, New New Hawaii.

He thinks of Susan, K9, the Daleks, and everyone and everything in his timeline that has led him to where he is now. He has two regenerations left, and the woman reigning both his hearts has a finite lifespan. Suddenly eternity seems too long and too short at the same time.

"Three", she says triumphantly.

"There!" He places the cube on the console table, his melancholy musings carefully hidden behind the grin of smug satisfaction on his face that she so wants to wipe off with a snog. "Did it in under a minute. Brilliant, me."

She snatches the cube up, trying so hard to find even one misplaced square in any face, or even the slightest indication that he used some trick. "I can't believe it", she says when she finds none.

He shrugs, leaning against the console with not a hint of modesty in his features. "Told you I can do it, didn't I?"

She rolls her eyes. "You told me you can sing too."

"I _can_ sing." He protests, rubbing the back of his neck. "I am just not good at it." He mumbles so quietly that she can barely hear him.

She shapes her mouth into the cutest pout she can master. "So you really won't take me to New New Hawaii?"

"New New New Hawaii", he corrects, "And no. Those were the terms of the bet, Rose. Off to fourteenth century Kriptilina. Allonsy!"

 _And then..._

"Five", he counts, the clock ticking at the back of his mind, a never ending white noise that comes to him as naturally as the beat of his hearts or the expansion and contraction of his lungs with every breathe.

She gulps the liquid from another glass, aims a ball at her target, and misses it by a foot and a few inches. Years of experience of playing beer pong is supposed to make her a pro, but apparently not when it comes to alien alcohol.

"Four", he says, the panic inside him rising as he scans the pub for the most feasible exit route.

She swears the room is spinning, or maybe the planet, or maybe it's just her. She misses another shot and mentally scolds herself for challenging an annoying alien prince to a game of beer pong as a means of settling the bill. Clearly not her best move, she's growing reckless day by day.

"Three." He knows it's a lost cause and wonders if she can leg it in her inebriated state. "Two", and "One."

He grabs her hand and they run in a way that would put a certain cartoon coyote to shame. When they reach the TARDIS, she hurls on his favorite pair of converse, and he bans her from getting drunk during battles that their lives depend on.

They laugh as they pant, and behind that cheerful sound is the hollow tick-tock of the clock at the back of his mind. He can feel it counting down the time he has left with her to treasure amazing moments like this. Tick, tock, tick. Atoms dissipating, heart beats fading- human life is so fragile at its best. He wonders where humans go after death. Do they have a ghost matrix like they had in Gallifrey? Or do they just fade away, disappear into the Void like they never even existed?

 _And then..._

They bump into Keisha one day and she's in need of help. It's too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence, but he has never been able to resist the siren call of a mystery, and she can never turn her back on her best friend.

So they set off on what would be their very last adventure in London. There's a chronoclock on Keisha's neck, a street hidden in plain view, and a woman called Me that he guesses he meets sometime in the future. What feels like the last hour he was alive is a blur, because the woman who looked into the heart of the TARDIS has once again put herself at stake by passing on her friend's death to herself, and this time he cannot kiss it better. His face darkens like storm clouds, and he threatens to destroy the entire street, the entire planet, the entire bleeding universe, he bargains, offers up his remaining lives, his everything, but in the end, there is not a thing he can do. He is going to lose her. Again.

He liked it better when he had to burn up a sun to say goodbye.

"No revenge, do you hear me?" She barks, her facade of bravery cracking at the edges.

"No wondering off, but you still did what you did", he accuses bitterly.

She shakes her head, pleading with him. "No, no, no. Don't go back to the man you were when I first met you."

"Was he that bad?"

"He was fantastic." She says with a sad smile, "But he was hurting. And I can't let you hurt, I can't."

"Then don't go." He begs, holding her hands tightly, hoping there is some power in the universe that will grant him this one miracle.

"I don't want to go", she tells him, squeezing the fingers interlaced with hers. "But I have to. And I want you to have a fantastic life. For me."

He takes a deep breathe to steady himself. "If this is our last moment together, then I won't lie to you. My life is over without you."

"Don't say that!" She scolds, tears streaming down her face now. "Donna told me about your little suicidal stint. Don't you dare do that again, you daft alien! My mum and dad and little brother are on the other side. You have to look after them. You have to look after the Universe. Promise me you will?"

He shakes his head vehemently, a single tear rolling down his cheek. "I love you."

"Quite right too", she mimics, with her tongue against her teeth in a failed attempt at playfulness. "And if this is my last chance to say it too, then, I guess,", she takes a step back, away from him, and looks him straight in the eye, pouring all her love and longing into her hazel irises, "My Doctor, I-"

Her lips part and her hands raise up like the wings of a swan that is ready to fly for the last time. There's a scream that he vaguely registers and black smoke and a raven flying away and the lifeless body of a blonde woman next to his feet that is definitely not Rose Tyler's. Because it can't be. No. It can't.

He's teleported away then, not even given a chance to give the woman he loves a proper burial, and he wants to die so badly. But he keeps coming back to life again and again and again for millions and millions of years, and he loses a little more of him every time he sees her smiling face flash before his eyes and then fade away.

Happy endings are really a myth, because in the end, billions of years and deaths and torture later, he doesn't remember much about the woman he loves, or the promises he made, and is just a dark, bitter, angry, ruthless Time Lord that the world starts calling The Valeyard.

 _At that wretched Bad Wolf Bay..._

He knows the outcome, the fixed point in time, the one haunting inevitability- he _is_ going to lose her. In every timeline, in every life they build together. It's a curse sometimes, knowing the future.

And at other times, it's a gift. It leaves him with the option of choosing the best possible future for her- one where she is happy and safe and with another him.

It's a bittersweet tie with the universe, but he will take it.

"Does it really need saying?"

 _("Her name was Rose.")_

 **A/N: I have a thing for sad plot-bunnies, I know. Hope you liked it though. :)**


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